Once upon a time, a critical mass of Hollywood men had military experience. What we see now are men without chests longing to be men without penises.

I suspect that few of the people reading this post watched last Sunday’s Academy Awards show. If you’re like me, you might have seen only one or two of the movies nominated and you were uninterested in watching people of dubious morality and intellect trumpet their values while simultaneously demeaning yours and then going the extra mile to insult you directly. While the Academy Awards were once an industry’s fun, exciting celebration of its contribution to America’s common culture, the Oscars are now nothing more than a bizarre, televised trade show about an industry that every year offends and bores more people.

Looking at the people both onstage and in the audience, all of whom have received a tremendous share of America’s bounty, thanks in large part to the Americans who idolize or simply enjoy them, one has to ask why Hollywood is so divorced from and hostile to America. After all, most of these habitues of the film world grew up all over America and theoretically should better reflect American values.

The easiest answer (I think) is Hollywood’s ties to academia — and we all know that academia has gone completely off the rails into cultural and economic Marxism. It was a localized infection but now, through generations of graduates, the infection is spreading throughout the American body.

We see this infection everywhere. Someone commented here that his father worked in upper level management at a large corporation, and was the last management person who rose through the ranks rather than having stepped into the jobs straight out of college. It’s those credentialed managers who have turned the American marketplace upside down, so that, where Americans might once have boycotted a corporation for having Nazi ties or refusing to serve or employ blacks, now corporations are boycotting Americans for failing the social justice purity test.

Hollywood’s particular anti-American boycott is a useful microcosm of the damage academia does to America because Hollywood is so visible. It’s not just visible — it forces itself upon us. It uses tried and true communication tactics to impose its views on every aspect of American life. It’s like a petri dish of social justice bacterial growth.

The most prominent people in Hollywood — upper level management or big name actors — either attended college in the last 40 years or desperately wish they had. The former come equipped with the whole panoply of social justice ideology, including its America-hatred, victim mentality, and racial obsessions. The latter, dogged by the feeling that they are intellectually inadequate, not only ape those ideas, but they obsess about and expand on them. “I’ll see you your Yale social justice education and raise you my uninformed emotionalism.”

Beyond the easy answer, I think there’s something else that makes Hollywood worse than the rest of America. Outside of Hollywood, even those who become infected with social justice ideas in college, have to face the real world: real bosses, real mortgages, real childcare issues, etc. Unavoidable reality tends to have a clarifying effect.

In Hollywood, though, once you float to the top of the hierarchy, reality changes. Not only do you avoid the day-to-day demands of ordinary living, but you also spend your life playing pretend. What does it matter if in real life you’re short, drink too much, treat people abusively, or follow strange new-age religious fads. All that matters is that, on screen, you’re unbearably gorgeous and sexy and strong. Life revolves around make-belief, not reality.

At this point, if you want to push back against where I’m going, you would say, “But Hollywood has always been plagued with money, fame, and adulation. We know now that some of the past’s biggest stars were seriously weird people. Why weren’t they also easy marks for the communists who started gravitating to Hollywood in the 1930s?”

I wonder if a new Facebook page, which I highly recommend, provides an answer to that question. The page is called Famous People Who Served In The Military. What’s so fascinating about it is learning how many Hollywood stars through the 1970s, those whom we watched on big screens and small, had military experience. Here are just a few examples, some of which are probably familiar to you and others of which may come as a surprise: [Read more…]